Thursday, October 15, 2015

On Second Thought - - The Trouble With Joe

The Trouble with Joe

By Emilie Richards

Publisher: Harlequin Bestselling Author Collection

Release Date: April 29, 2015

(originally published 1994)

Samantha Whitehurst and Joe Giovanelli meet in a Georgetown
restaurant on Sam’s twenty-first birthday. Sam is the well-bred daughter of
well-bred, wealthy, emotionally distant parents; Joe is a waiter in the
restaurant. He is warm and vital and outgoing, everything Sam’s parents are not.
By the end of the meal, Joe has been fired, thanks to Sam’s banker father; by
the end of the evening, he and Sam have fallen in love.

The two could hardly be more different. Sam is the only
child of affluent parents, Protestant in religious affiliation, and shy and
reserved in personality. Joe is a poor graduate student training to become a
teacher, the second of seven children in a boisterous, loving Italian family,
and a practicing Catholic. Joe has reservations about Sam being happy with the
life he can give her. Sam has none, and Joe cannot resist her. And so they are
married.

Four years later, they have settled in Foxcove, a small town
in North Carolina, near Joe’s family. Their life should have been perfect. They
are still deeply in love, they have jobs in which they take great satisfaction
(Sam as a first-grade teacher and Joe as a high school principal), and they
have almost finished renovating an old general store into their dream home,
complete with a fort Joe built for the large family they planned. But instead
of reveling in all they have, they can only watch as their marriage founders.

After three years of trying to have a baby and Sam’s having
undergone every fertility test known, Joe reluctantly agrees to be tested. The
results devastate him. With a low sperm count and an allergic reaction to his
own sperm, Joe will never father a child. He responds to the shame, anger, and
pain he feels by withdrawing. He refuses to consider adoption, and every glance
at the woman he loves serves only to remind him of how he has failed her. Thus,
he rejects her every overture. Soon Joe and Sam are not connecting physically
or emotionally.

Into this explosive situation comes Corey Haskins, one of
Sam’s students—a neglected, highly intelligent little girl with a chip on her
shoulder as big as she is, a heart full of love for Sam, and a fear of “mean”
Joe to which she refuses to surrender. Sam loves Corey dearly, and when Corey’s
indifferent mother is killed in an automobile accident, Sam insists that she
and Joe give her a home until the child’s father can be located. Joe
reluctantly agrees, but he stipulates that Corey’s presence is a temporary
placement. Over the next months, through a series of challenges and conflicts
and moments of understanding, Corey captures Joe’s heart and shows him that
there is more than one way to become a father.

The Trouble with Joe
was first published as Silhouette Special Edition #873. It is one of my
all-time favorite contemporary romances and one of my top ten category
romances. It beautifully demonstrates that in the hands of a gifted writer a
category romance can have the complexity of a single-title and provide the
reader with a reading experience that lacks nothing in emotional satisfaction.

I’m a fan of the marriage-in-trouble trope, and this is one
of the best. Richards uses flashbacks to show Sam and Joe from their first
meeting, and the joy the reader sees between the two in scenes from their early
life as a couple increases the reader’s investment in these characters and
deepens the poignancy of the distance that grows between Sam and Joe later. The
flashbacks also ensure that the reader sees Joe at his best, making it easier
to remain sympathetic when his pain causes him to hurt others. While the
greatest character growth is Joe’s, Sam also grows stronger and more assertive
over the course of the story.

This is also Corey’s story. She is neither a pretty paper
doll character whose only function is that of a plot device nor an adorable
child who makes the reader melt. She is a troubled, flawed child and not a
pretty one. She uses her intelligence to win battles, and she can strike with hurtful
accuracy to send her message. But she is also needy and vulnerable and smart
and stubborn and courageous. She is as fully dimensional as Sam and Joe.

Fertility stories are not uncommon in romance fiction, but
they generally deal with the heroine’s inability to conceive. Too often for my
taste, they end with some miraculous conception. The Trouble with Joe is rare on two counts: first, the infertility
problem is the hero’s problem, and second, the hero’s dreams of fatherhood are
just as central to the way he views himself as are any heroine’s dreams of
motherhood and his inability to father a child biologically is just as heart
shattering for him as any heroine’s response to her infertility. And Richards offers her readers no miracle
other than the one love works.

If you are a romance reader who thinks all categories are
slight stories, I suggest you read this one and see how wrong you are. If you
like your romance contemporary with real people facing real problems, I think
you’ll like this one. If you love a story that grabs you with the opening scene
and doesn’t let go until you sigh mistily over the final sentence of a terrific
epilogue, I highly recommend this book. As an added incentive, if you purchase
this digital edition, you’ll also get Someone
Like Her by Janice Kay Johnson, another amazing category writer who gives
her readers compelling, emotionally rich stories.

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